Saturday, April 21, 2012

Unveiling to Know Avail: Revealing the Wariness of Womanhood

“[T]hey raise the veil just enough to let us catch a glimpse of the
Medusa head behind it…Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down
might not see him. We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a
make-believe that there are no monsters.

I no longer want to write on the
veil, do you hear, right on the veil or on the subject of the veil, around it
or in its folds, under its authority or under its law, in a word neither on it
nor under it…Go and see if I’m lying.

The ‘war on women’ is performed upon cruelly crafted
stages[1].
In the ideological drama continually reinventing simulacra of phallogentrism the
most basic rule of warfare has been violated; a prince/ss ought not engage in
war upon multiple fronts. At home Americans battle to capture the appeal of
women, while in Afghanistan American women engage in war as women, against
women, and for women simultaneously. In January the U.S. Army launched a new
“elite cultural support team,” a cohort of women soldiers trained to assist
special operations forces for what the military calls ‘gender
appropriate engagement’(Zucchino). These women
don both prosthetic helmets fit for cyberpunks and traditional Burkas, veiled
revelations of pious faith.

While
much has been written about the figure of the Afghani woman portrayed as a
victim of the veil, the introduction of the veiled American female fighter complicates
the plot of previous polemics. This essay attempts to critically assess,
explore, and compare the differences in approach between a more traditional,
Marxist method of ideological critique and the more generative, deconstructive
style of Post-Feminist. In order to demonstrate the ways in which understandings
of women & war and virtue, vice & the veil have become truly ‘special
operations forces,” this essay tries to interpret, analyze, and undo the
rhetorical/ideological grammars of David Zucchino’s L.A. Times article, “A
counterinsurgency behind the burka”(Zucchino).

While
there are many ways of being a Marxist[2],
this paper will expound upon a more traditional Marxist interpretation; in
practice this means adopting a basic base/superstructure framework of analysis,
assuming ideological phenomena are necessarily reducible to class, and
maintaining the distinction between ideological criticism, which is historical
and scientific, and moralism, which is a crass and utopian socialism[3].

Marxist criticism is a method of ideological critique
that is premised upon a materialist understanding of the production of
rhetoric. Marx & Engels most dogmatically state the materialist thesis in
“The German Ideology:”

[W]e do not set
out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of,
imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from
real, active men, and…we demonstrate the development of the ideological
reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human
brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process… (Marx & Engels, 154).[4]

In
essence, Marx & Engels look at what wo/men do, not what they claim to do.
This statement may seem to indicate the idea of rhetorical criticism has no
place in the Marxist struggle, so how can the two projects be reconciled? As
Foss astutely notes, Marxist ideological criticism is “a way of analyzing
cultural products in terms of the social and economic practices and
institutions that produce them” (Foss, 212-3). The
Marxist method of criticism is deduced from the theoretical assumption that
rhetorical artifacts are necessarily constituted by and constitutive of the
specific historical and material circumstances out of which they emerge, rather
than being the mere imitation of eternally perfect forms or ideas, as idealists
presume, or as a free-floating structure of representation, as some
structuralists contend. All of history is the history of class struggle. Thus, political
economy furnishes the stage upon which the dramas of history unfold, and
culture, the state, and rhetoric reflect the alienated condition of a civilization
wallowing in the mire of ‘false consciousness.’

Marxists employ a dialectical method which seeks to
unearth the contradictions between a text’s ideological content, rhetoric as a
distilled mystification of proletarian estrangement, and its actual content,
the totality of social relations concealed, yet present, which testify to the
universality of class struggle. The Marxist worldview is necessarily
totalizing, the model of base and superstructure argues that the control and
development of the modes of production determine social relations in all of
their variegated manifestations. Only criticism which aims to expose the
concrete situation of society in relation to the totality of economic history
can de-mystify ideology. Although any artifact can be criticized through a
Marxist approach, Marxists approach texts merely to prove what they already
knew, that texts are evidence of capital’s precarious contradictions. Marxist
critics’ ultimate aim is to raise class-consciousness, but it remains to be
seen whether they are as competent conjurers as their bourgeois
counterparts.

Post-Feminism: écriture feminine

Feminism is a cacophony not a chorus[5].
Many forms of feminist criticism have proliferated since the days of the
suffragists. While, political equality is a necessary and laudable end, second
wave feminists sought not mere equality in political representation or pay, but
to undermine and even flip the structures of patriarchal privilege, challenge
the representation of feminism as a single, unified movement by attending to
race, class, sexuality and identity, and politicize the personal. Flipping the
binary or revising the history of physical anthropology only proved the ruse of
the form – decentering masculinity only proved the center’s absence.

Third wave feminists deconstructs “the false theatre
of phallocentric representation” that presents man/woman in an andocentric and oppositional
binary by writing through the body, by inventing grammars, syntaxes, and “the impregnable language that will wreck partitions,
classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes,” and (Cixous, 886 &
884 respectively). Largely influenced by French feminists such as Luce Irigaray
and Helene Cixous post-feminism critiqued not just the reified representations of
man and woman as forms of symbolic violence but sought to undermine the
supplementary, associative binaries subtending the power infused fields of
gender’s everyday textuality[6].
Post-feminists deconstruct
binaries such as: Phallus/Lack, Presence/Absence, Speech/Writing, Nature/Culture,
Mind/Body, Reason/Emotion, etc… The point is not merely to equalize the two
terms, but to implode the logic of violence subtending the oppositional system
itself. By working from “within”[7]
language itself - through what Cixous termed écriture féminine or “women’s
writing” or similarly through Irigaray’s playfully mimetic writing - critics
can open up the effervescence of the third, a space beyond the despotism of the
binary’s dual structure (Cixous, 887 & 875 respectively). Women’s writing,
however, was not confined to women as defined according to an essentialist biology.
In fact, Cixous thought that not all women could engage in women’s writing but that
some men could[8].

Women’s writing is a mode of writing which resists
the ideology of patriarchal society by exploding the strict division of the
social into neatly defined binaries. Traditional feminists seek to unearth the
ways in which an artifact is constituted by and constitutive of gendered
assumptions. Since second wave feminists argue that the ‘personal is political’
and post-feminists believe that ‘there is no outside the text’ any artifact is
open to criticism. Post-feminists saw rhetoric as the primary means of
patriarchal repression. Thus, feminine liberation required the invention of new
rhetorics that let gendered differences be. This mode of writing is often very
performative – challenging the strict adherence to linear reasoning, switching
between exuberantly emotional and overtly rational voices, and blurring the
divisions between genres and figurative and literal language. Post-feminists
differ from their ideological counterparts in that they do not merely map an
artifact onto a static grid of intelligibility, but perform the process of
writing through body, of singing the song of the woman, and of becoming
feminine outside of an economy of life and death struggle.

Voice! That,
too, is launching forth and effusion without return. Exclamation, cry,
breathlessness, yell, cough, vomit, music. Voice leaves. Voice loses. She
leaves. She loses. And that is how she writes, as one throws a voice—forward
into the void (Cixous and Clement, 173).

On the one hand, comparing these two methods appears
to be a simple and discrete process of evaluation since they are based in very
different basic assumptions about the nature of rhetoric, Marxism from a
materialist framework and Post-Feminism from a deconstructive background. On
the other hand, the engagement with a particular artifact births the
realization that comparison necessarily occurs on the limits, where a text
speaks in multiple tongues, and where what is at stake is precisely what
remains, as if, un-said.

David
Zucchino’s article offers a promising specimen for analyzing the resonances and
discontinuities between Marxist and Post-Feminist interpretation because it
narrates the contradictory intersections between the masculine drive for
mastery and profit, invulnerability and presence and the implicitly opposed
converse, the feminine as nurturing and fragile, veiled and absent. But if one
reads more attentively one may meet another possibility, “a process of different
subjects knowing one another and beginning one another anew only from the
living boundaries of the other: a multiple and inexhaustible course with
millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into
the in-between” (Cixous 882). One may
don Marx’s accursed cap and reveal the magic of bourgeois alienation’s
mystification or one may embody the more than naked fragility of the veil – the
veil in all of its supple, playful, yea-saying to “erotogeneity” (Cixous, 889).

Crucial
differences between the two methods manifest themselves most explicitly in the
ways in which the role of the critic is understood. Criticism for the Marxist
is a world-historical
task of de-mystifying the totality of social relations and raising class consciousness.
The Marxist assumption that a text’s true meaning, purpose, and effects can be
objectively distinguished from the phantasms of ideological sorcery denies the
deconstructionist premise that a text’s meaning is ambiguous to the point of
undecidability. For Cixous, women’s writing is precisely not about arriving at
a singularly defined conclusion. Rather it is a “process of becoming…As subject for history,
woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. Woman un-thinks the
unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding
contradictions into a single battlefield”
(Cixous, 882).

With
the Zucchino piece, a Marxist would call attention to the historical and
material impetus for the text’s production. For example, Marxists might criticize
Zucchino’s intention to represent the U.S. Army’s objectives in Afghanistan as
a humanitarian, civilizing mission as ideological window-dressing mystifying
the contradictions between the espoused ideals of U.S. Exceptionalism and Neoliberalism’s
violent underbelly of cultural effacement. A Marxist would emphasize the
dialectical nature of Zucchino’s article, exposing the ways in which the
alienated and contradictory nature of reality is distilled within the text itself.
For example, the article begins with the tragic tale of the program’s first
female death. The fact that household bombs are destroying even the more
culturally sensitive women is evidence for a Marxist critique of the ways
cultural imperialism mystifies the root causes of conflict; capitalism is most
insidious when it dons the human face for its veil.

In
contrast to the dogmatic rigidity of the Marxist approach, a post-feminist
critic would approach the text not from ‘without,’ wielding critique as an infallible
weapon or absolute barometer of truth. Nay, beyond the self-comforting fictions
of class determinism, deconstructive feminists unravel, diminish, and undo a
text’s concealed ruins and ruinous concealment, as if, from ‘within’ the
artifact itself. A third wave feminist might begin with the title, “A
counterinsurgency behind the burka,” by proceeding to play ‘in’ its ambiguity.
In just the first five words a multiplicity of meanings emerges that exceed the
iron grip of the Marxist vanguard. One example is the indeterminate status of behind, does it mean “to the far
side of (someone), typically so as to be hidden” meaning a counterinsurgency
veiled by the object it seeks to reveal (New Oxford American Dictionary)? Or “in
a line or procession” or “after
the departure or death of” as if the counterinsurgency must wait and follow after
the burka (New Oxford American Dictionary)? Or “in support of or giving
guidance to” as if morally backing the burka or using the burka as a sign of
authority (New Oxford American Dictionary)?

Disclosed
within this singular example is all the difference in the world. “[T]o touch
“that” which one calls “veil” is to touch everything. You’ll leave nothing
intact…as soon as you take on the word ‘veil’” (Derrida, 24). While Marxists
might contend that you cannot ‘play’ your way out of poverty, post-feminists
are likewise justified in arguing you cannot produce your way out of
patriarchy. What would Marxists make of this line for example, “‘We're
kind of a third gender,’ she said. ‘The men don't worry about looking weak in
front of us.’” (Zucchino)? M-C-M
circuits need not apply. A post-feminist criticism is at least a necessary
supplement to, if not an outright more promising grammar of textual encounter
than Marxist criticism for exploring the elisions, fissures and excesses which
constitute the stuff of any oikonomia.

But these two methods are not merely talking past one
another[10].
For example, Zucchino tells about one woman’s recollection of why she joined
the team, “when the Army asked for volunteers for the new cultural teams. ‘I
knew that was my calling,’ she said. ‘I thought it was the coolest thing ever’”
(Zucchino). This vignette is a prime example that encapsulates the ways in
which subjects are ‘hailed’ by the call of Ideology (Althusser). Althusser’s
post-Marxist conception of Ideology without a history evinces the need to think
beyond the impossible desire to transcend, escape, or overcome Ideology
completely[11].
One can never get outside of Ideology.As Althusser writes, “ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same
time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)” (Althusser). The
logical conclusion of the Marxist ideological critique of naturalized
conceptions of the subject is the dialectical undoing of stable categories of
gender. As Althusser puts it, “individuals are always-already
interpellated by ideology as subjects” (Althusser).[12]Althusser’s post-Marxist approach offers
a more fruitful way of communicating between the dogmatic tendencies of
orthodox Marxism and the sometimes overly ‘romanticized’ radicalism of
post-feminism.

Out of conceiving the category of the Subject
as Ideologically interpellated Rhetoric emerges in a new light. Rhetoric forms
the sinews of connections, the sensitive surfaces of subjects’ nervous skins,
and the intoxicating milk of seduction’s dance with desire – rhetoric emerges
as the inter- of interpellation and the in of the in-between. Without a voice
thrown into the void Althusser’s policeman remains mute. Without the first
laugh of Cixous’ Medusa there would be no Ha in the Hail.

[1]“a drama manglingly restaged, to reinstate again and
again the religion of the father. Because we don't want that. We don't fawn
around the supreme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the
negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ". . . And
yes," says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing;
"I said yes, I will Yes" (Cixous, 884)

[2] Marx’s name remains a specter that haunts the left’s obsession with the
‘true’ Marx, as we saw in our class reading of Althusser’s attempt to separate
the humanist, early or young Marx of the Manuscripts from the scientist of Das
Kapital and as Derrida artfully demonstrates in Spectres
of Marx. Gramsci’s concept of hegemony adds some
nuance to the concept of ideology; whereas ideology is represented as a more
coherent and abstracted representation of the ruling classes consciousness
contained within popular ideas, hegemony seeks to flesh out the contradictory
aspects of more varied social classes in their everyday, partial and incomplete
manifestations. Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature clearly illustrates the distinction: “Hegemony is then not only the
articulate upper level of
'ideology', nor are its forms of control only those ordinarily seen as
'manipulation' or 'indoctrination.' It is a whole body of practices and
expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy,
our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is a lived system of
meanings and values-constitutive and constituting-which as they are experienced
as practices appear as reciprocally confirming (Williams, 111).”

[3] Most notably Marx’s attacks on Fourier and Proudhon in The
Communist Manifesto & “The Poverty of Philosophy.”

[4] If one looks at what Marx & Engels did one need not read very far
to realize they incessantly invoke literary figures, fictive characters such as
‘Mr. Moneybags’ or rely upon histories which are nothing more than narratives –
such as the historian Thucydides. The opening Perseus quote shows Marx’s use of
mythology to make an argument. Some might contend that though allusions abound,
literature per se was not the basis for deducing
economic principles and this may have some merit. Marx & Engels’ objects of
criticism in the quote from “The German Ideology” were classical economists and
‘German Sociologists’ who often invoked the figure of Robinson Crusoe to
explain economic principles, Natural Law Theorists who alluded to man in the
‘state of nature,’ or religious conceptions of man as made after God’s own
image.

[5] “[M]ake the old single-grooved mother tongue reverberate
with more than one language” (Cixous, 885).

[7]“If woman has always functioned "within" the
discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite
signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its
very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this "within,"
to explode it, turn it around, and seize it;” (Cixous, 887).

[8] Dr. Davis noted this in class, but I still haven’t been able to find
the cite, but can be deduced from “The Laugh of the Medusa” more generally; “there is, at this time, no general woman, no one
typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the
infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can't talk about a
female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes…(Cixous, 876).

[9] “[W]riting
is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same
and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death”
(Cixous, 882).

[10] There are entire schools of feminist thought which are based in a
materialist framework, largely influenced by Engels The Origin
of the Family Private Property and the State which
isolates the first divisions of labour as between male and female and
criticizes marriage as a form of bourgeois prostitution and the nuclear family
as an unnatural derivative of the transition from feudalism to industrial
production. Yet the work is also criticized for basing its argument largely on
biological assumptions about natural selection and for reifying gender
understood as the man/woman dyad. “It is one
of the most absurd notions derived from 18th century Enlightenment that
in the beginning of society woman was the slave of man” (Engels, 60).

[11]“[O]ne of the effects of ideology is the practicaldenegationof the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never
says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in
scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional
case) or (the general case): I was in ideology” (Althusser).

[12]Capital’s necessary tendency toward expansion inevitably leads to the
new social arrangements of identity in order to adapt to the needs of
developing the modes of production Engels saw the first manifestations of, and
predicted the continuance of the downfall of bourgeois marriage as a response
to growing productive needs.